


without choking on my own air

by TheTartWitch



Series: One-shots of AUs [2]
Category: Rise of the Guardians (2012), X-Men (Movieverse)
Genre: Gen, Jack and Logan are buddies, Jack is literally chill, Mutant Jack, Rogue is Jack's child, Scott is a buttface
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-04
Updated: 2016-11-04
Packaged: 2018-08-29 01:06:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,736
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8469850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheTartWitch/pseuds/TheTartWitch
Summary: Jack is a mutant. Basically first X-Men movie with Jack in it. Rewrite of a few scenes.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "Ice Fields" (From Ghost Light). Couldn't find an author.  
> Summary says all.

They’re in another bar. Wolverine’s losing his cage match at the moment, but that’s alright. He’ll be winning soon enough.

At the bar, a man is denouncing mutants. He’s going on and on about how they’re all just prissy princesses who don’t deserve anything more than the rest of humanity. He’s gathering quite the following of people bobbing their heads and throwing in facts that actually aren’t facts, they’re opinions and stories they’ve heard.

Jack’s eye starts twitching. These people have closed their eyes, covered their ears, and prayed. They’ve got no idea what’s sitting right down the bar from them. They will soon if they don’t shut up, though.

A girl is sitting on his other side, hunching with every one of their comments. She’s being obvious; she’s going to get noticed.

Wolverine scores a hit. The crowd goes wild with anger and an uproar of screaming and stomping. Jack sips his water casually and eyes the man who’d started the gossiping fest as he gets up. He winds his way down the bar, straight towards the flinching girl. Jack can see her eyes beneath her hood: she knows what’s coming, and either her mutation is useless in a fight or she’s too powerful, with a conscience to boot. Jack sighs low in his throat.

The bartender catches sight of him tugging off his violet gloves ( _“Everyone looks at violet, Jack!” Emma says, eyes gleaming. “It’s too pretty to look away!”_ ) and he approaches, face growing angry. “Sir..!”

“Relax,” Jack says easily, “I just wanna show them they should leave her alone, that’s all. I promise I won’t break anything.”

His bare palm lands on the wood of the bar evenly, absorbing the warmth, and even as he breathes it into himself, wishes he could feel it again, the cold embedded inside him goes wild. It tries to correct the temperature of the bar to match him.

Ice shoots from around his fingers like a fast-forward of grass growing. It leaps down the bar, spreads thickly across the surface, and hops off the bar onto the man’s reaching hand going for the girl’s hood. It catches him in a loose hold, restraining him. It’s not cold ( _he can turn off the frostbite freeze in that one section_ ) but the man shrieks in fear like a child. Jack breathes in the sudden, growing chill. Wolverine’s cage match has stopped; nothing like the sound of real fear to distract people from anger.

The girl’s eyes meet his. She’s grinning; he smirks back. He draws a rabbit in the frost with one finger, a cat, a horse, a dragon, and with a wave of his hand they’re expanding, filling with air and life. The rabbit fumbles over to the bartender gracelessly, and he pets it with wonder in the wideness of his eyes.

Wolverine snarls. “Kid, I told you not to do that anymore!”

Jack shrugs easily. _Get yourself a friend who can do both cute and cuddly and vicious and malevolent._ When he lifts his hand away, the frost recedes into his fingers, and when the boy of them bangs the door shut on their way out of the bar, the frost beasts go right through it like it’s not there.

\--

The girl stands quickly, grabbing her duffel, and runs through the bar so fast no one has time to grab her.

\--

Jack’s in the passenger seat of Logan’s truck, leaning his head out the window like a puppy to soak in the nip of winter when he feels it: a disturbance in the thin layer of frost he’s decorated the trailer with. _A footprint_ , he thinks, and signals to Logan with one hand while using the ice to chain their intruder to the trailer’s bed. Muffled expletives echo in the tunnel of the truck. Logan rolls his eyes and gets out to fetch the girl from the bar out of their trailer.

\--

“My name’s Rogue,” she says warily, eyeing Jack’s bright-white head. Logan sniffs.

“Logan. That’s Jack.”

Rogue looks at him with something approaching hero-worship. She glances at his gloved hands. “How’d you do that? With the ice?”

“My body seems to be convinced that warmth is a disease the rest of the world suffers from, so when I hit puberty it kicked in and literally froze me over. Sometimes the ice escapes.” He drones. He doesn’t mention the years spent as a guinea pig for a group of scientists, or the moment he woke on that lake and realized he’d turned his little sister into an icicle, pale and cold and shocked into place. Her eyes were brown and bloodshot, staring at him like he’d surprised her.

Rogue doesn’t ask.

Point for her.

\--

They’re trundling along, sharing jerky and teaching each other their limits for touching, when a man steps out in front of the truck. Logan cusses and swerves desperately, aware that while _he_ may heal like nothing ever happened and Jack’s got the ability to freeze over any wounds like a snowman, Rogue’s a sack of tenuously held-together meat and boney bits.

They’re going to flip. Jack turns to face her, already tugging off a glove.

“Take off your seatbelt and curl up as best you can,” he tells her, trying not to let stress leak through. She stares at him and tugs at her belt.

“It won’t come off!” She’s yelling. He cusses ( _Logan’s influence, his mouth used to be cleaner around children_ ) and snaps his fingers in her direction. Snowy sparks fly off his fingertips and wrap around her like a shroud, solidifying in a room-temperature, several-inches-thick layer of protection.

She’s screaming when it finishes taking shape, and seconds later they’re touching down, the roof crunching and crushing them. Logan’s thrown from his seat and through the windshield. A piece of glass, just sharp enough against Jack’s icy belly, pierces through him to anchor in the back of the seat. He roars, furious and in pain, as his body tries to plug the holes by sealing the jagged glass inside.

There’s an answering roar from the trees, something that sounds more like a howl to Jack’s ears, and he jerks. Logan tumbles out of the forest slowly, staggering. He cracks his neck as a cut on his forehead seals over. “Jack?” He says, staring through what’s left of the windshield. “You and the girl alright?”

Jack gasps weakly at him. He’s going to be in too much pain to talk for a while, so he just gestures vaguely in the direction of Rogue’s ice bubble. Her face can be seen through it, just barely, with huge eyes and gloved palms.

Logan frowns and starts forward, but turns at the last second to intercept a charging wild man - the man who leaped in front of the truck. They fight, and for once Jack can’t tell who will win.

His bare hand lands on the dashboard, clenching it between pale knuckles, and trickles of frost, like tears, slip from between them. It slithers down the cab and the engine and into the snow. He can tell he has less than a minute left, but the snow he controls can still help his gruff friend.

As his vision greys and curls at the edges, he watches Logan land an awful blow, and his opponent notices the sea of curling, writhing ice behind the Wolverine.

\--

He’s surprised to wake up in a lab. When his body shuts down to heal, he tends to resemble a frozen corpse: no heartbeat, no pulse, no flickering eyelids. Literally dead to the world. Logan must have seen the glass and brought him along to wherever this is.

He blinks at the ice ball beside him and touches it with a finger. The ice slides back under his skin like a boost and he groans when his sight flickers, his systems lighting up. He really needs a drink after all that commotion.

Rogue tumbles out onto the tile.

He looks around. Logan’s on the table beside him, unconscious, and a woman is bending over him, her ginger hair pulled back into a ponytail. Something is attached to his friend’s chest, and she is pulling out scientific equipment.

He doesn’t even have to move. He knows Logan's instincts.

\--

When Logan jerks awake and grabs the woman’s wrist, Jack chuckles weakly. “Took you awhile, my friend,” he grins, “You’re getting old.”

Logan scoffs, pushing his way off the bed and tying the woman’s wrist to the bed. He stares at her for a second, perplexed about something, and on instinct Jack slides a tendril of frost-dust into his friend’s head.

She’s in there, messing with him. Jack freezes her out viciously, and she wheezes in the physical world.

“I’d advise you not to try that again,” he says cheerfully, watching her head whip around to face him. He shields both Rogue and Logan quickly as Logan steps over to pick him up.

“Depleted, Frosty?” Logan grunts, and Jack sprawls loosely in his arms.

“Yes,” Jack says back, unable to do much by himself. He sends his frost-dust out around them, searching for threats, and finds himself relaxing. “We’re in a school. Rogue, I think you might be interested in this place.”

\--

The Professor is a handsome old man, Jack concludes, then laughs to himself because he’s so much older than this child sitting in the wheelchair. The man’s eyebrows raise, and Jack smiles at him over his cup of water. They’ve put a plastic gallon next to him, and every time his cup empties Logan reaches over to refill it absentmindedly, a by-product of a great deal of time spent adjusting to each other.

“An _ice boy_?” Says the one who shoots lasers from his eyes, in annoyance. He rolls his eyes behind his special glasses. “A _sassy_ one. Oh, yay.”

Jack smirks at him. He bats his eyelashes and purrs, “ _Oh, look, I’ve been impaled_ ,” and cracks up while Logan snorts into a fist. They’ve developed a mutual dislike of Scott Summers, hinging most definitely on the fact that while Logan is _interested_ in Jean Grey, the doctor woman, he wasn’t going to act on it until Scott made an ass of himself and now Logan’s determined to show the lady a better time. Jack cheers him on from the sidelines.

Jean chuckles good-naturedly and Scott turns to her, aghast at this betrayal.

Making _Frozen_ references has benefits sometimes, who knew?

**Author's Note:**

> Can't help but feel like Magneto would find Jack fascinating. A mixture of Colossus, Iceman, and Emma Frost (heh), who doesn't eat but drinks gallons of water.  
> Basically Jack becomes everyone's mom. Rogue is his duckling, Logan is his pet angry-beast, and Prof. X is like this intelligent creature he's never seen before.  
> Emma is dead. She is Jack's little sister, and his powers woke up while he was on the ice and he fell over. She rushed over to help him, but he didn't have full control of his powers and his cold attacked her warmth by flash-freezing her. He was unconscious and couldn't stop or save her, and it hurts his heart everyday. She's who the major character death tag is for. He is still 300 years old, or thereabouts. Yup.


End file.
